ADRIFT Forum

A forum where new and old games can be reviewed - an alternative to the reviews on the Adventures page of the main ADRIFT site. Also the place to ask for any assistance if you are stuck playing a particular game.

I've been working on a game that keeps starting and stalling in equal measures. Every time I do some work on it, I think "hey, this is the best thing I've ever done!" and this is followed a few minutes later by "um no, it isn't" when I run into writer's block about how it's going to proceed, and then I push it to one side and forget about it for a day or two. At the moment, it doesn't even have a title but I'm going to get it done if it kills me. Which it well might.

Playing games, (ADRIFT-wise) I had a go at "Fortress of Fear" which seemed to have about ten times as many locations as it really needed and lots of NPCs who kept speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. I didn't get very far but I intend to go back to it at some point. I also played "Son of Camelot". I can't say I was overwhelmed by it but I spent longer on it than I did either of the other games in the series. Before that, I played "Pervert Action Crisis" which I liked a lot, even though it seemed a bit too linear for the most part. Away from the ADRIFT world, I had a go at "Counterfeit Monkey", which impressed me no end, and I really need to go back and finish it one of these days.

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In progress: Shadows of the Mind 77k and counting. ETA: sometime in 2018.

I've probably started on five different projects, and shelved them again. I think I might actually be on to something with my current idea, and I'm starting to feel familiar enough with the developer to actually have an idea how to create the things I want, so hopefully it'll turn into something resembling a game. I have a lot of studying to do as well though, and have recently taken up Crusader Kings 2 multiplayer, so progress is slow.As a side-project, to practice my writing skills, I've volunteered for a project that asked for writers. Not being done in Adrift though, as far as I know.

Still working on D-Day. Will it ever be finished? I don't know. V.5 hasn't got the same appeal as the old V.4 for some reason. When I read through th eforum I find that I don't understand half of what people are talking about. %Player%.Held(False).Count > 2 is just one of them I'm not blind to the power of V.5 but it has turned into a programming language rather than the old "Easy way to create a text adventure"

I guess I'll still be working on it, and it will probably be released at some point.

Unfortunately I don't have much time to play any games, Adrift or others although I keep promising myself that tonight I will sit down and have a quiet evening in front of the computer... Yeah, right.. keep dreaming

D-Day V.5 in progress 86Kb (On backburner)Anno 1700 progress 125Kb (Have you noticed that the number is rising? )

I am working on my remake of "The Axe of Kolt". Chapter 1 is complete bar the fine-tuning and I am about 1/3 of the way through Chapter 2. These "chapters" mirror the parts of the original Spectrum adventure, although in the ADRIFT version you are able to to return to Chapter 1 from 2, which you could not do in the original as the parts were linked by saved games. Chapters 3 and 4 will be different as in the original there were two "Points of No Return" at or near the start of each part.

David Whyld wrote:Playing games, (ADRIFT-wise) I had a go at "Fortress of Fear" which seemed to have about ten times as many locations as it really needed and lots of NPCs who kept speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. I didn't get very far but I intend to go back to it at some point.

When I first heard about the Marienburg Fortress many years ago I was inspired to write an adventure game based upon it, "The Fortress of Fear", which at that time was programmed with PAW on a 128k Sinclair Spectrum. The Lower Castle, which made up Part 1, didn't have that many locations due to the memory constraints. However, when I moved to the PC and started using ADRIFT to program the game - and had unlimited memory to play with - I felt I wanted to portray something of the vastness of this huge fortress as it was in the 15th Century. One person who started playtesting the adventure also said that there were far too many locations and I did try to cut them down to about half what it is, but for me it just wasn't the same and I reverted to the original layout.

Go to the Hexagonal Tower and find the shield. Then go to the church and find the crypt. Once you have got a "feel" for that place, pull the lever and go up to the place next to the church. You will need the shield otherwise you will get skewered!

Po. Prune wrote:I'm not blind to the power of V.5 but it has turned into a programming language rather than the old "Easy way to create a text adventure"

I agree 100%. One of the reasons I discarded Inform7 and TADS as platforms on which to program "The Fortress of Fear" was that I have absolutely no aptitude for this type of programming language. An expression like "%Player%.Held(False).Count > 2" is OK for those who have an aptitude for maths and the training in this sort of programming language, but there are those of us like myself who simply CANNOT understand this sort of thing and how it is used, and to be quite frank I do not want to.

Those that are good at this sort of thing seem to be blind to this lack of understanding in others. Why can't we have a variable which is the equivilent of "%Player%.Held(False).Count", e.g. "objectsheld" as well as the expression? If a Drifter wants to use function type expressions there is nothing stopping him or her, but at least give us lesser mortals something we can understand as an alternative. And don't even mention "Intellisense", I'm not interested!

Rant over, sorry but I had to get that off my chest!

OUT NOW: Run, Bronwynn, Run!Current W.I.P.: Magnetic MoonAlso available: The Axe of Kolt, The Spectre of Castle Coris, The Fortress of Fear, Die Feuerfaust - The Fist of Fire and The Lost Children

Po. Prune wrote:I'm not blind to the power of V.5 but it has turned into a programming language rather than the old "Easy way to create a text adventure"

Actually, my work in progress is a V4 game. It started off as a V5 game but it was more trouble than it was worth, so in the end I went back to V4. Technically it would probably be a better game if I wrote it in V5, but it would take me so long to get it done, and be such a hassle, that it'd be years before I finished it. If I got it finished at all.

Until such time as V5 is as easy to use as V4, which is very unlikely to happen, I'll be sticking with V4.

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In progress: Shadows of the Mind 77k and counting. ETA: sometime in 2018.

Gosh, those are quite worrying comments. I'm not sure why an ADRIFT 4 user would worry about functions such as Player.Held.Count. Not using the function in v5 would be the equivalent functionality in v4.

But Lazzah, I will try to get User Defined Functions working in the next release. This should mean we can create an %ObjectsHeld% function that returns the same value.

You can understand I find it very frustrating that people some people are still choosing v4 over v5. I have created a new thread, to try to get to the bottom of this.

I working on a few projects at the moment. I'm busy finishing my comp entry, The Blank Wall, which is obviously a V5 game. It is very nearly ready for beta testing. I'm also working on a couple of Inform7 games, Again and Again and Word of the Day. One has had some testing, the other is nearly ready.

Like David, I've been playing Counterfeit Monkey, which is a very impressive game.

Currently working on "The Blank Wall" in ADRIFT 5 and "Again and Again" in Inform 7.Delron, the home of Otter Interactive Fiction.

I've got one main project going which is going to have a lot of experimental stuff in it. While that is being worked on, I'm also giving the standard library a look-over to fix any blatant problems (such as "examine myself" failing after player character change or the "remove before drop" task possibly sending items in your inventory to another character)

Additionally, I've been going back to the first IF game I recall ever playing through to the end: The PK Girl. (Maybe I'll actually get all the endings... bah, who am I kidding?)

Kitsune Zeta wrote:I'm also giving the standard library a look-over to fix any blatant problems (such as "examine myself" failing after player character change or the "remove before drop" task possibly sending items in your inventory to another character)

Lazzah wrote:When I first heard about the Marienburg Fortress many years ago I was inspired to write an adventure game based upon it, "The Fortress of Fear", which at that time was programmed with PAW on a 128k Sinclair Spectrum. The Lower Castle, which made up Part 1, didn't have that many locations due to the memory constraints. However, when I moved to the PC and started using ADRIFT to program the game - and had unlimited memory to play with - I felt I wanted to portray something of the vastness of this huge fortress as it was in the 15th Century. One person who started playtesting the adventure also said that there were far too many locations and I did try to cut them down to about half what it is, but for me it just wasn't the same and I reverted to the original layout.

I6 Designer's Manual wrote:Limitations can be a blessing in disguise, because they force a designerto keep asking if this part or that part is altogether necessary. Here is BrianMoriarty, whose research went as far as looking up geological surveys:The first thing I did was sit down and make a map of the Trinity site. It waschanged about 50 times trying to simplify it and get it down from over 100rooms to the 40 or so rooms that now comprise it. It was a lot more accurateand very detailed, but a lot of that detail was totally useless.This reduction to 40 rooms would have been worthwhile even if memory anddisc space had been unlimited. Redundant locations can be an indication oftoo much prose and too little interaction. `The Light: Shelby's Addendum'(C. A. McCarthy, 1995) contains much that is praiseworthy but its reviewerstook a dim view of its having over twenty locations in which nothing happens

I recommend reading (IIRC) Section VIII of the Inform 6 Designer's Manual and Appendix B of the TADS 2 manual.These parts focus on design elements, almost completely with the I6 manual; with the TADS manual, you can ignore the TADS-relevant parts.

Lazzah wrote:I agree 100%. One of the reasons I discarded Inform7 and TADS as platforms on which to program "The Fortress of Fear" was that I have absolutely no aptitude for this type of programming language. An expression like "%Player%.Held(False).Count > 2" is OK for those who have an aptitude for maths and the training in this sort of programming language, but there are those of us like myself who simply CANNOT understand this sort of thing and how it is used, and to be quite frank I do not want to.

Those that are good at this sort of thing seem to be blind to this lack of understanding in others. Why can't we have a variable which is the equivilent of "%Player%.Held(False).Count", e.g. "objectsheld" as well as the expression? If a Drifter wants to use function type expressions there is nothing stopping him or her, but at least give us lesser mortals something we can understand as an alternative. And don't even mention "Intellisense", I'm not interested!

Well, the I7 version would be "if the number of objects held by the player is at least 2:"(Somebody described I7 as being deceptively readable: the meaning of correct I7 code is very clear, but it doesn't accept as many phrasings as you'd accept.)

And the reason why you can't have such a variable is that the value doesn't behave like a variable. It acts like a function.1) ADRIFT 5 does not currently support custom functions.2) Trying to support all the different functions-pretending-to-be-variables was one of the big millstones Campbell had about ADRIFT 4.

Bloodhounds can make you laugh and cuss in the same breath. They are endearing, faithful, and can sling drool ten feet in any direction. -- Virginia Lanier